We were reading the news the other morning about Boris Johnson, who is charming, smart, able, possessed of extraordinary privilege that no head of government will have again and completely without principles.
You cannot have everything, although he has become the prime minister of Britain. We read of that with fascination, as though we were a child somewhere on the East Coast during World War II looking across the Atlantic and seeing the blazing silhouettes of sinking merchant ships on the horizon.
There are tankers involved again: The British recently impounded an Iranian ship at the Straits of Gibraltar because it was smuggling oil to Syria in contravention of European Union sanctions – all of which Tehran concedes except for the smuggling. So the Iranians captured a British-flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz in frank retaliation.
This begins to sound like a distant echo of the Barbary Wars, but with a twist: Britain belatedly discovered it no longer has a navy. This occurred just when President Trump signaled that the special relationship with Britain was no longer special; and it was confusing because we could not tell whether Trump wished to see other people or just wants to be alone.
One of the great things about it all – and it is hard to think there could be many, or even two – is how momentarily, if not normal, then un-alone this makes us feel at home.
It is just one of the absurdist elements that Johnson is widely expected to bring Britain’s economy crashing down with the exit from the EU he promised, and with it the government. It is possible that within a year’s time, the Labour Party will come to power, and then Jeremy Corbyn would become prime minister. Johnson is charming, for whatever good that will do now. Corbyn, Johnson’s insurance policy, is a bloodless socialist who is desperately trying to disavow anti-Semitism while he waits, no doubt reminding himself that if he can just do as little as humanly possible now he can scoop up Humpty Dumpty Britannia.
British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey recalled he was standing by his office window at dusk with a friend in August, 1914, when he observed, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” This was a particularly poignant thing to have remembered saying later, because it seems so prescient, of course, with the advance of World War I, which was thought to be the end of civilization and very nearly was; and because it was dead wrong.
Grey died in 1933, by which time the lamps were burning across Europe again, and soon would be blazing through the night in armaments factories on both sides of the Atlantic. It might be more accurate to say the lights of Europe are always flickering, which would be annoying and dangerous if it were your house.
We were chatting with a British friend of ours who lives in Worcestershire at the same time Johnson’s ascent was unfolding against the tankers backdrop, and he said, “My understanding is that the tanker seized in the Med by the British was illegally running oil to Syria. But to be honest, it doesn’t matter and I don’t give a damn. My country was a busted flush decades ago, and when Corbyn gets the keys to No. 10 later this year, we’ll become the Venezuela of western Europe.”
It is almost enough, as a good American, to want to comfort a Brit; to say, “There, there, things could be worse... Well, they could be as bad... Actually, I think you’ll find it’s a shock at first, but after a while you may cease to dwell on precisely how things have come to this pass and look ahead to what should be salvaged.
“We’re assuming that time will come for us. But you know, it has been over three years now. Scoot over. Let me buy you a pint and we’ll cry in our beer together. We might as well get lit.”
